Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
Last time the Doctor learned who the enemy is while the others did things that weren’t in the episode.
What to say about Barbara that I didn’t say in the last novel? As the history teacher she could cover information duties when the TARDIS landed at some point in Earth’s past. That’s how the group functioned. Each had their own job. Ian could do the science, Barbara the history, the Doctor the sci-fi stuff, and Susan could pinch hit in each of those areas for the audience. Even though by this point the show had moved away from teaching anything and were just adventures in time and space, there are benefits to that setup, and I’m not sure the show ever really used them that well. The Doctor basically knows everything and the teachers were becoming redundant. I don’t know for certain if that’s why Ian and Barbara left the show at the same time or if the actors, William Russell and Jacqueline Hill, just decided they wanted to do other things.
At least by going together they both got to return to Earth, even if the Doctor was two years off. As we saw with Rose many decades later, they probably had some serious explaining to do. Maybe because I was an American kid in the 1980s when I finally saw that final episode of theirs, but I don’t see why they couldn’t have been returned to 1963 proper. Nothing stood out to be as being out of place. At any rate, it’s time to see what the characters are up to.
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